That Insidious Noise

 

St. Sisoes the Great over the bones of Alexander "the great."

An article/story published by NPR about far-right extremists becoming Orthodox is making the rounds, and it meshes with a context that many of you know I've decried for several years now: the violent contorting of the Orthodox Church - her way of life and teachings - in order to render her a combatant in the socio-political culture war (SPCW). It is difficult for me to express the extent to which this strikes me as a futile effort akin to trying to bring oil into solution with water. 

There is nothing at all wrong with having political opinions, voting your conscience, and considering political matters. However, the SPCW is something more insidious. It has a way of becoming a near constant in our lives as it infects every aspect of our day to day living. It almost seems to mindlessly WANT to become the very context by which we interpret everything: what we hear in the news, what we hear people say, what we see people do, what we witness in movies, videos, and TV Shows. Worse still we even allow it to color what we THINK people mean by what they say and do. 

We awake in the morning and fire up our phones or laptops or tablets and delve into the echo chambers of our preferred sources anxious to find what evil has been committed by the "enemy" while we slept. Those immoral liberals or those fascist conservatives! As we meet new people, whether by reading their writings or listening to their words, without even thinking about it, we wait to see/hear those trigger words which will betray their alliance in the SPCW. As the knee-jerks, once we do, we have them in a box...we believe we understand them completely. They are either one of US or one of THEM. 

And indeed, we do precisely the same with churches. The article by NPR suggests that some people who identify as one particularly radical partisan group in the SPCW, believe they've found a home in the Orthodox Church. What this means is that they think they have a found a sort of spiritual forward operating base from which they can continue their fight. But, what I hope and pray they will find - in time - is that the SPCW is largely a grand distraction from the principal way of life as taught in the Orthodox Church. As I wrote in "The Rutted Road", the Church functions within and celebrates an extremely and radically different context, so much so that the very rationale for the SPCW literally ceases to make sense.  How one can seriously engage the Church, for example, in her admonitions of Lent and NOT understand this is beyond me. The great distraction of the SPCW is simply this: it posits that evil is principally OUT THERE and it must be dealt with...or else. 

The evil that the Church exhorts us to confront is decidedly not OUT THERE. The fear you feel of it, is wildly misplaced and should you ever defeat it by violent force of law, you will accomplish nothing of eternal consequence. The SPCW is deeply concerned with the context of the 21st century, one might pause to ask to what extent any of us pay much mind to the everyday arguments of 6th century Byzantium? It all ends up in the same tomb of Alexander "the great." 

The SPCW is a battle over abstracts...the generic unborn babies or young women in crisis pregnancies. And it seeks solutions that are OUT THERE. It's easy to love and serve abstract humanity, but much harder to love and serve a particular human person. The SPCW would be a very different thing if a particular person of  one side housed and cared for a young mother choosing not to kill her baby and if a particular person from the other side housed and cared for an immigrant family. But that's not really what the SPCW is about and it's also why it is so easy to be a combatant in it. Christ calls us NOT to love abstractly, but particularly. 

The article is not wrong - though it may itself be a weapon in an effort to bring the SPCW into the Church (yes, both sides do it). We've likely all heard a few folks answer the question of why they became Orthodox with an expression that they believe her to be an allie in the SPCW. It is my profound hope and prayer that perhaps after a few Lenten cycles, their answer will mature and be polished with the centuries old balm of stillness and prayer, which is intended more to change our hearts and minds than God's. 

*I AM* the source of the evil that MUST be dealt with. It is NOT elsewhere - at least not to any degree that I will ever be able to change. We do not argue, fight, or force people into righteousness and the Kingdom. Rather we LOVE them, particularly. And we focus on the one thing that we can play a direct role in healing: our own hearts. That's not easy, because it forces us to embrace our shame, which is more easily assuaged by looking OUTWARD.

Fr. Steven Freeman, always a source of spiritual wisdom for me, expressed it better than I just did when he posted about the Capital Riots over a year ago. In part he says: 

"If Orthodoxy is nothing more than an anxious voice among many, begging to be heard and believed because its description of its fears are persuasive, then it will, in the main, disappear. Alasdair MacIntyre, in a paragraph on modernity that has become famous, said that the world is waiting for a new St. Benedict. He is wrong. God is already sustaining the world by his hidden saints, and holds all things in existence through their prayers. The Orthodox faith bears witness to this and invites her children into that great reality."

Our work, our battle is to enter into that "great reality" more and more fully. I would exhort us all to either READ or LISTEN to what he suggests.